After She Left

by Penelope Hanley

  ‘I don’t have Keira’s address. According to Maureen’s letters, she’s been a bit peripatetic, like me.’

  ‘Send it care of Maureen – better still, is there a family lawyer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Excellent. Send it to him and he can get in touch with Keira. Her imagination will be stoked and it will break the ice.’

  ‘But then what?’

  ‘It’s all we need to do at this stage. We can buy brown paper and string at the newsagent down the road and you can visit the post office before we go.’

  ‘Go?’

  ‘I think that you should come with me to London. Paul’s in Australia for a few weeks, visiting his mother, so we’ll have the place to ourselves. It’s comfortable and right near Hampstead Heath. We can walk on the Heath, sketch, we can go to plays and restaurants and have all sorts of distractions, which you need at the moment.’

  ‘Hmmm.’

  Janet said, ‘Don’t even think about it – just come – we can hop on the train tonight and be there by dinner time. You can leave a forwarding address with your landlady.’

  There was little for Deirdre to pack up. One of the advantages of a peripatetic life is that one cannot acquire much excess baggage. Every time Owen and Deirdre travelled they sorted out their possessions, giving much away to their old friends and neighbours and travelling forth on a new adventure unencumbered.

  Deirdre sent The Silent World in cardboard and brown paper with string to Stephen Field’s office and put Janet’s address as the return address.

  29

  MAUREEN

  July 1973

  It was no good. She had tried to talk to Jim, especially since Rowan’s release from prison at the start of the year. But he was unreceptive.

  It wasn’t as if Rowan had been locked up for being a criminal. He’d been in jail for having ideals and being true to them! Their son had served a prison sentence because his conscience told him to take a course of action that he knew would result in the loss of his freedom. He wasn’t a criminal. He was brave. But Jim refused to see it that way.

  Maureen was in the front room, ironing Sean’s pale blue school shirt, her cigarette burning away on the ashtray’s rim, forgotten.

  All Jim did these days was work and sleep. What did they share? A history and children. Were those two things enough?

  The word ‘divorce’ floated into her consciousness, as it did sometimes. Normally her immediate thought was that in the eyes of the Church it was forbidden. But what did celibate priests know about marital dynamics? And what would the Pope in Rome know about the sex lives of the women he was forbidding contraceptives to?

  She hung Sean’s pale blue shirt on the back of a chair and picked up her own buttercup yellow lined linen skirt.

  Through the window a large movement caught her eye. A cockatoo sailed down to the birdbath, gripping the rim with its black clawed feet. Maureen picked up her cigarette and inhaled, staring at the big white bird, which angled its body down with smooth grace to drink, beak in the water and tail in the air. The bird stood upright again and slowly turned around. Now it was cooling its tail in the water! The cockatoo flew up to the edge of next door’s roof and stood looking down at the birdbath with an appraising black eye. A native pigeon alighted on the roof and stood next to it.

  Maureen glanced back at the yellow linen being smoothed out by the iron.

  There was too much in Catholicism and in conservative politics that no longer made sense.

  She’d been on a journey, step by tiny step, ending here in this sudden change of perspective. Jim had not come along for any of that ride.

  The sandy ground beneath Maureen’s feet was shifting and sliding and gathering momentum. She’d been paddling in the protected little bay of Clovelly but now she was negotiating the huge swell of a Coogee high tide. Frightening. But exhilarating.

  ‘Mum? Muu-uum?’ She jumped.

  ‘Sean! Sorry, I was miles away. I beg your pardon?’

  ‘What are we having for tea?’

  She put the iron in its stand and took the skirt from the ironing board.

  ‘You know what? Let’s have takeaway fish and chips.’

  Sean grinned with surprise. ‘Yeah – great!’

  30

  KEIRA

  August 1973

  Keira was going to confront Maureen about her discovery. She rehearsed it on the way to her mother’s place on Friday afternoon, watching through the window as the bus trundled past the familiar houses and shops.

  She would tell her mother, ‘It’s no big deal. No one cares about illegitimacy now, don’t worry about it.’ But she had lied to them all these years. Her mother was always going on about honesty but she was being a hypocrite.

  The bus pulled up and as Keira walked along she was still rehearsing what she would say. But when she knocked on the door it was her brother Jimmy who opened it. Lady leapt up on her and Keira patted her head. Jimmy stood aside and let Keira in. He looked a bit sheepish. She kissed his hairy cheek, breathing in his familiar smell of tobacco and motorcycle grease. ‘Hi, how are you? Haven’t seen you for a while.’

  He just shrugged. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Just visiting the parent, eh?’ He smiled, and she said, ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at work?’

  ‘Ah,’ he drawled. ‘Let’s say I’m takin’ a sickie.’ Keira glanced at him. They both knew just what their father would say: ‘You won’t be an apprentice much longer if you keep taking sickies!’ Lady trotted along behind them down the hall, nails clicking on the lino.

  Maureen was sitting at the kitchen bench, the Telegraph crossword in front of her. The kettle hissed on the stove’s electric burner. Jimmy stood awkwardly, seeming to take up a lot of space in the neat white room in his greasy jeans and old maroon jumper. He looked a bit unkempt with his dark beard and moustache and messy shoulder-length hair. Lady sat and stared at him, pointed ears alert. Keira put her shoulder bag down and went over and kissed Maureen, smelling the familiar cigarette smell mixed with Tea Roses perfume.

  ‘Hullo, darling,’ Maureen said. She looked paler than usual.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ said Keira.

  ‘Jimmy has spent the past week in jail.’

  ‘Whoah!’ Keira turned to her brother. ‘What for?’

  ‘Possession of marijuana.’

  ‘No! What … How much did they find?’

  ‘One-thirtieth of an ounce.’

  Keira gasped. ‘Such a tiny amount! That’s so mean! Does Dad know?’ Keira reached up for cups and saucers from the cupboard. She took the milk from the fridge and poured some into the bottom of the cups.

  Jimmy said, ‘Uh … yeah. Pete and I were camping in Bellingen with some others on the long weekend. I was sleeping in Pete’s tent and the cops raided it and found the grass. They put us in the lock-up in Bellingen.’

  ‘Weren’t you allowed a phone call?’

  ‘Yeah, Pete called his girlfriend and I called a mate who lives in Bellingen. But he wasn’t home. Next day they transferred us to Grafton Gaol.’

  The kettle started screaming its high-pitched wail until Keira’s ears hurt. Jimmy turned off the burner and poured the kettle’s contents into the green china teapot.

  The familiar smell of hot tea wafted up between them as they sat at the bench, Jimmy and Keira facing their mother. They drank their tea in silence for a bit. Lady lay on the lino, her chin resting on Keira’s sandalled foot.

  ‘When do you have to go to court?’ asked Keira.

  ‘Wednesday week.’ He and Maureen both lit cigarettes.

  ‘Did you go to Stephen Field?’ said Maureen.

  ‘Yes. He couldn’t do it but he recommended this guy with experience representing bikies and drug addicts.’

  Maureen looked paler than ever and swallowed some tea as if it were anti-fainting medicine.

  ‘How did they catch you?’ asked Keira.

  ‘I did a wheel-stand from the lights and didn’t see a cop car. It was a hi
ghway patrol charger and they chased me. I did a right hand turn, scraping the pegs, and sped down the street with them after me. At one stage I thought I’d lost them because I went down a lane I knew had a short wooden post in the middle, so I could get through but they couldn’t. But they reversed and in a couple of streets managed to get close again and then I caught the peg on a driveway gutter – dropped the bike, it went out of control. Next thing I knew the cops had a gun to my head and I was in handcuffs.

  ‘They thought I must be running away from some huge crime I’d just committed. But I wasn’t running away. I was an altar boy, for Christ’s sake.’ Keira saw Maureen wince.

  ‘And I had a lump of hash in my pocket that they didn’t find.’

  ‘Phew! What did Dad say to you?’ Keira cringed at the thought.

  ‘Not much,’ said Jimmy, and she laughed with him at the thought of their famously laconic father. ‘He did a lot of staring at me as if I was some repugnant insect he’d like to crush beneath his hobnail boot.’

  Maureen said, ‘You can’t imagine what it’s been like – he said we always did the right thing, spent vast sums on Catholic schools for you all, and we just produce “juvenile delinquents”. I wish you’d talk to your father, Keira. For one thing, it would take the attention from Jimmy.’

  ‘Yeah, Keir, talk to your father. Take the pressure off me!’ Jimmy’s brown eyes lit up with amusement.

  ‘I do talk to him.’

  ‘You say almost nothing, or you fight. You were such friends when you were little. You know when you left home so early he was very worried. He thought you’d fall flat on your face.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It’s a euphemism for getting pregnant.’ Maureen crushed out her cigarette stub in the metal ashtray. ‘That’s what he was afraid of. His favourite daughter and all.’

  ‘Very funny, his only daughter – and so sexist. It only applies to girls. What about boys?’ Keira turned to Jimmy. ‘You can sow as many wild oats as you like and he doesn’t worry about that.’

  ‘He’s got other things to worry about with me.’ Jimmy’s laugh was contagious and Keira giggled.

  Maureen laughed briefly, more an exasperated snort. Then she said, ‘It’s the girl who has the baby.’

  ‘Really, Mother?’ said Keira. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Don’t roll your eyes up at me.’ Maureen lit another cigarette. ‘I’m entitled to my views.’

  Jimmy and Keira glanced at each other.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Keira, ‘but obviously I was referring to the double standard of blaming one gender when it’s two who are responsible, and the female gets all the consequences and the male gets off scott free!’

  ‘Well, he can: a male can just walk away. It’s unfair but that’s the way it is and that’s the way it’s always been.’

  ‘But it doesn’t have to be that way. If people’s attitudes change – along with legislation, which the Labor Government is changing as we speak with the single mum’s pension – the whole dismal sexist edifice will crumble. Don’t you think, Jimmy?’

  ‘S’pose that’d be good, but I don’t reckon it’ll happen.’

  Keira groaned. ‘The way you just accept things – it’s infuriating. The only thing preventing change is apathy like yours!’

  ‘There’s a difference between apathy and being realistic,’ said Maureen.

  ‘Don’t you think we can change society? Change is happening right now because people are demanding it. Workers marched for better conditions and they got it, women went on strike for equal pay and they got that, or at least some did. And if enough people live in enlightened ways then society will change. You know, if they had the single mum’s pension back when you were young, Mum, things would have been a lot better for you and your mother.’ Keira looked significantly at her. Maureen held her glance, her eyes widening. Keira continued. ‘The people I’ve been interviewing have told me things.’

  ‘I knew this would happen,’ said Maureen through gritted teeth.

  Keira continued. ‘I wasn’t going to say this in front of Jimmy, but he should know anyway. We all should, since we were told lies about it.’

  ‘Know what?’ said Jimmy.

  Keira waited, watching her mother, who said nothing but whose complexion had turned greyish. Keira announced: ‘That Deirdre was a single mother.’

  Colour returned to Maureen’s complexion. ‘I didn’t actually lie. It was a sin of omission,’ she said, looking oddly relieved.

  Keira rolled her eyes. ‘And not only that,’ she said, ‘Charles Wild wasn’t even our grandfather.’

  ‘No?’ Jimmy narrowed his eyes against his cigarette smoke.

  Maureen was silent. Then she said, ‘It’s means and ends, Keira.’

  Jimmy looked at Maureen through their mutual smoke haze. Then he drawled, ‘Isn’t that what the Nazis said?’

  Maureen looked angry then. ‘You’ll both realise how complex life is when you have children of your own.’

  ‘Keira’s not gonna have children.’

  ‘Going to, not “gonna”,’ said Maureen automatically. ‘And things change.’ There was that irritating smug tone of her mother’s again. ‘When you fall in love properly for the first time, you might see what I mean.’

  ‘You’ve been seeing Alan for a while now, haven’t you?’ said Jimmy. ‘Are you properly in love yet? You’ll be changing your name too, then. You’ll be Keira Bovingdon!’ He guffawed.

  ‘I told you, I’m never getting married and even if I did, I’d keep my own name. But then, it’d be a great excuse to get married: just so I could get rid of my father’s name. And since I don’t believe in marriage, I might “live in sin” with Alan and legally change my name to my mother’s maiden name.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous!’ said Maureen, sounding furious.

  ‘Well, Dad has barely spoken to me for years, and I feel far more Irish than English.’ Keira turned to Maureen. ‘It’s your side of the family I relate to.’

  Maureen went as white as the wall and compressed her lips. She took another cigarette out and lit it.

  ‘Keira Wild,’ said Jimmy. ‘That sounds good. But if Charles Wild was not our grandfather, who was?’ They looked at Maureen.

  ‘Deirdre told me who – Carlo Trimble. I know nothing about him except that he was from Dublin, and a married Protestant.’

  ‘So till Deirdre married Charles, O’Mara was her name.’

  ‘Keira O’Mara?’ said Jimmy. ‘Nope – too many a’s and r’s, sounds stupid. Wild is a lot better.’

  ‘Of course I could change it to anything I want but Keira Wild does sound good.’ Keira thought if she’d gone this far, she might as well say what else she’d learnt. ‘Plus one of the people I interviewed told me about Deirdre’s father’s boats being stolen by the rent collectors in Dingle. What a terrible injustice.’

  ‘Bloody landlords!’ said Jimmy.

  ‘They took them while they were at the markets and stayed the night in town, and when they came to get their boats, they’d been stolen. Isn’t that outrageous?’

  ‘Wow.’

  Maureen sat there smoking for a while. Then she said, ‘You can get off your high horse of moral indignation now; you’re going to hear the truth, not just a bit of it.’

  ‘I know the truth,’ said Keira.

  ‘You know nothing!’

  Keira and Jimmy looked at each other in shock.

  ‘The rent collectors taking the boats was an action that was provoked. Not long before it happened, the rent collectors had come to the Great Blasket to collect the long-overdue rent owed them. They could be seen from the cliff and Deirdre called the other women and told them to gather all the rocks they could find. They waited at the cliff side watching two boatloads of rent collectors and policemen. When any tried setting foot on the slipway, Deirdre and her companions threw rocks down at them. They were hurling rocks indiscriminately and one rock went into the bottom of one of their boats, nearly sma
shing it.

  ‘The men beat a retreat and rowed back as fast as they could over the waves to the mainland again.’

  Keira looked at Jimmy. Their eyes were wide. ‘Wow,’ they said simultaneously.

  ‘What bravery,’ said Keira. ‘Deirdre resisted the patriarchal forces of authority!’

  ‘It was not brave,’ said Maureen. ‘It was foolhardy and impetuous. It resulted in the rent collectors doing something far more damaging – taking their boats at Dingle. They depended on those boats for their livelihood! You see, this is the reason I didn’t want you to do this project, Keira. You get hold of one little bit of information and don’t know the whole story. And there’s a lot more that you don’t know, and you will never know, that I protected you from by not saying much about my mother.’

  ‘What? I don’t need protecting. I had to find out for myself that Charles Wild was not our grandfather. You lied about that!’

  Maureen puffed on, then lay her cigarette on the ashtray’s indented rim. A slim wand of bluish-grey smoke rose into the air. ‘I told you all you need to know.’ Her tone was mild but final.

  ‘It’s not all I need to know!’ Keira’s voice was angry.

  Maureen’s jaw was firm as she spoke. ‘Trust me, it is.’ She mashed her cigarette stub out in the ashtray.

  31

  DEIRDRE

  August 1973

  The tabby cat, part of Janet’s Hampstead house-minding deal, was sitting on Deirdre’s lap, rhythmically sticking its claws in and out of Deirdre’s be-jeaned thighs. Deirdre was sitting in the window seat reading The Independent.

  ‘Doesn’t that hurt?’ asked Janet.

  ‘Hardly at all,’ said Deirdre, patting the cat’s head. ‘She’s giving me free acupuncture.’

  ‘The mail’s come.’ Janet walked over to her with a bundle of letters. ‘Here’s something more interesting for you to read,’ she said, ‘all the way from Australia! Look at the postmarks! These letters have been around the world in search of you, from Spain to London to Devon and back to London! All airmail but they might as well have been on a slow boat from China!’